Migraines do a few things to the body. They wake you up at unholy hours of a Saturday morning, give you wild dreams and, sometimes, just sometimes, help to coalesce varied tangential thoughts. Out of one such night, comes today's post.
The August 2011 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine has a number of excellent articles relating to the process of learning as well as doing.
Dean Jansa writes about the impact seeing has over books and magazines when it comes to learning craft practices. The classic master/journeyman/apprentice system, barely existing in today's craft arena, provided a wealth of learning by doing by example. Dean stresses the importance of "There is no right way, there is just the way you were taught by the shop Master." Such an approach has resulted in the field of furniture history and given conservation people lots of headaches.
It's often possible to identify a piece of hand made furniture by the idiosyncratic construction details of a particular shop. It may not be that this was the Right Way, it's just that that was the way that shop culture did it.
I'm reminded of this important fact when reading early 20th C, 19th C and even 18th C books on crafts and trades. Prior to the advent of the despicable Glass Plate Negative (which, along with the Halftone process, serves to give me endless heartache when attempting to digitize an old book), writers depended upon their words first and engravings second. The cost of engraving meant that more words led to a lower book price, more engravings meant a possibly lower profit margin. Engravings were used to illustrate the written description, the reverse of how we write How-To books today. With the exception of many architectural books, whose engravings were the primary teaching experience, the writer had to find a way to describe a process with sufficient clarity to make the process doable by the reader.
I'm reminded of this currently as I have been reviewing books on wood carving. Most have a workable blend of written description accompanied by an engraved or halftone image containing some minimal directions. The text is necessary to explain the image but often the text is so convoluted I feel as if my neck is twisting around in an attempt to follow the described stroke of the carving tool. Which might explain why my neck hurts this morning.
I seem to be reminding myself quite a bit this morning, an occurrence I blame on the train-of-thought utterances migraines seem to produce for me.
Back to proprioception. Loosely described, proprioception, along with being a very lyrical word to pronounce, means the awareness of the body in space. Not the movie 2001 space, but the space your body inhabitates and how your senses and physical being relates to it. In one of my past lives as a Rehabilitation Counselor, I worked with a great many clients whose physical or neural injuries interefered with their proprioceptive system. Balance problems, manual dexterity, awareness of others, etc. were all possible outcomes of birth trauma or a few too many hits to the head. Which must be why my neurologist instructed me after concussion #4: Stop hitting your head!
On to Robert Lang's article on the role Tai Chi has played for him in developing his woodworking style. Full Disclosure: I have never studied Tai Chi. I did earn a brown belt in Judo way back around 35 years ago and that is it for me. While Robert's applying Tai Chi to how he relates his body to the process of forming wood with tools is a bit too much Ian Kirbyish for me, I finally Got what he was saying.
Doing craft well is using your proprioceptive system well. Said another way:
"Just remember, there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything and the wrong way is to keep trying to make everybody else do it the right way. ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter"
In the end, it's up to you, your neural pathways and how they interact with the world that will tell you when you have your feet in the right place, your back and shoulders aligned and your arms where they should be.
In closing, herewith be the words I should live by (I'ld recommend that you, the reader, also live by them but that would be counter to Colonel Potter's pronouncement):
"Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. ~Dandemis"
Till next (I have a migraine and wake up at an unholy hour of a Saturday morning), Gary
